Dan Mitchell writes in the New York Post:
A lot of people get upset about the national debt, which is somewhere between $11 trillion and $16 trillion, depending on whether you include money the government owes itself. Those are big numbers — but if you add up the amount of money that the government is promising to spend for entitlement programs in the future and compare that figure to the amount of revenue that the government projects it will collect for those programs, the cumulative shortfall is more than $100 trillion. And that’s after adjusting for inflation. Some politicians claim this huge, baked-into-the-cake expansion of government isn’t a problem, because we can raise taxes. But that’s exactly what Europe’s welfare states tried — and it didn’t work. Simply stated, even huge tax hikes won’t stem the flow of red ink in the long run if government keeps growing faster than the private economy. This is the fiscal problem that demands attention. Absent real entitlement reform, such as block-granting Medicaid to the states, the burden of government spending will consume ever-larger shares of our economic output with each passing year.
A couple of points. First the 5 trillion that in theory is owed by the government to itself is only true if the Federal Reserve is owned by the government. It is not and has never been. It is a private bank owned by twelve other US banks.
The only thing that keeps the US economy afloat is the funds borrowed by the government and then pumped in via one method or another. If the medical budgets get cut the way it is proposed what do you think happens to the service providers who rely on that business.
If you appoint the directors and receive the profits you are the effective owner. It doesn’t matter who holds the shares. That was just a dodge to circumvent the prohibition in the Constitution from issuing paper money.